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The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

Monday, August 15, 2016

The State We're In: Global Higher Education

by Claire Chambers

The current volatile state of global higher education raises urgent questions. Student protests broke out at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in March 2015. These demonstrations initially called to remove the statue of the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes from campus.

Similarly, in the United States and beyond, Black Lives Matter is gaining traction. It combats systematic racism and discrimination as well as police killings of black people. The movement emerged in response to the lack of justice for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. There has been a vicious backlash against the group around the slogan "All Lives Matter," whose participants attempt to paint Black Lives Matter as violent Marxists.

This July Patricia Leary, a professor at Whittier Law School, wrote an incisive rejoinder to a student letter criticizing her decision to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on campus. In this reply, Leary dismantles the assumption that the motto "Black Lives Matter" is preceded by a silent "only":

There are some implicit words that precede "Black Lives Matter," and they go something like this:

Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of the police and the indifference of society in general and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that...

At the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, a Dalit study circle was banned in May 2015. Earlier this year Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, took his life. Vemula had been stripped of his stipend as punishment for demonstrating against governmental reprisals for the 1993 Mumbai bombings.

Some commentators compare this situation to Mrs Gandhi's dictatorial mid-1970s Emergency. Arundhati Roy writes of the BJP's "instinctive hostility towards intellectual activity." The BJP's flinging around of the terms "anti-national" and "sedition" stifles critique and is reminiscent of 1950s McCarthyism, or the way the Blasphemy Laws are used to settle vendettas in present-day Pakistan.

Over here, British-Pakistani feminist theorist Sara Ahmed resigned her professorship at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June because of the thorny issue of sexual harassment. Rather than seeing her move as passivity – resigning and therefore being resigned to the status quo – she urged people to view it as "an act of feminist protest and an act of feminist self-care." Ahmed claims that sexual misconduct is "normalized and generalized," when it is actually an institutional problem. She describes the silence that envelops sexual harassment in higher education, especially as most cases end with confidentiality clauses. Yet Ahmed argues that speaking out against the issue and building up an archive of evidence is crucial. At the time of writing this article, Ahmed's position that sexual harassment is endemic in academia was fortified by the case of media studies lecturer Lee Salter. He was convicted of beating, stamping on, and throwing salt at his student girlfriend Allison Smith. And yet his employer, the University of Sussex, did not see fit to suspend him from work until the media furore apparently forced the institution's hand.

In 2014, Mushtaq Bilal, author of Writing Pakistan, wrote an article for Dawn entitled "Of Doctors and Quacks." In it he lambasted Pakistani universities' postgraduate provision, lack of critical thinking and paucity of genuine research. Fearing reprisals from his university, he published the piece under a pseudonym.

Bilal's broader point is that in Pakistani scholarship (and society at large) there is little freedom of expression or thought. Protests such as those described earlier do not even get off the ground in Pakistan. Thinking back to Professor Leary's Black Lives Matter t-shirt controversy, many universities in Pakistan police what is worn by students through dress codes. At Bahria University, for example, male students are never supposed to wear sandals and rarely shalwar kameez, while women must wear scarves and only "light" makeup. These rules are not always enforced at Bahria, but there was outcry a few years ago when security staff at the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad turned away students dressed in chappals and sportswear. So much for freedom of expression.

All this is not to suggest that no critical thinking happens on Pakistani university campuses. On the contrary, there are many brilliant scholars in the country, pockets of excellence still exist, and Pakistani universities once had a strong leftist tradition. However, since Zia-ul-Haq's regime, Pakistani higher education institutions, particularly their arts departments, have faced restrictions and a lack of funding which limit research. In the climate of fear that has worsened in recent years, universities have been cleansed more than ever.

Strands we need to draw out from this exploration include that the influence of social media as both a positive and negative force in protests can hardly be overstated. Additionally, there is a pressing need to divest universities of racism, casteism, classism, sexism, and other oppressive forces. Education is part of the problem but it can also spearhead the solution. As Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argues in a 1986 book, we need to decolonize our minds.